Video data transmission has become increasingly popular, and the demand for video streaming also has increased as digital video provides significant improvement in quality over conventional analog video in creating, modifying, transmitting, storing, recording and displaying motion videos and still images. A number of different video coding standards have been established for coding these digital video data. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), for example, has developed a number of standards including MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 for coding digital video. Other standards include the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunications (ITU-T) H.264 standard and associated proprietary standards. Many of these video coding standards allow for improved video data transmission rates by coding the data in a compressed fashion. Compression can reduce the overall amount of video data required for effective transmission. Most video coding standards also utilize graphics and video compression techniques designed to facilitate video and image transmission over low-bandwidth networks.
Video compression technology, however, can cause visual artifacts that severely degrade the visual quality of the video. One artifact that degrades visual quality is blockiness. Blockiness manifests itself as the appearance of a block structure in the video. One conventional solution to remove the blockiness artifact is to employ a video deblocking filter during post-processing or after decompression. Conventional deblocking filters can reduce the negative visual impact of blockiness in the decompressed video. These filters, however, generally require a significant amount of computational complexity at the video decoder and/or encoder, which translates into higher cost for obtaining these filters and intensive labor in designing these filters.